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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
"Terror and Liberalism" challenges the notion that these are only Western stories, and that Islamic radicalism and Baathism have wholly indigenous roots. Berman documents the interpenetration of Western and Muslim identities and influences, the development of Islamic fundamentalism in response to liberalism, the incorporation of both fascist and Stalinist elements into the Baath movement. In the chapters that for me are the high point of the book, he analyzes the work of the late Islamist philosopher Sayyid Qutb, who wrote, among other things, an exhaustive commentary on the Quran. To Qutb, the world was a sinkhole of alienation, afflicted with a "hideous schizophrenia" that went back to the early Christians, with their separation of the sacred and secular realms, and that culminated in modern liberalism. The schizophrenia threatened to infiltrate and destroy Islam, not through conquest but through the spread of liberal ideas. This was the crisis that made jihad imperative: a theological, ideological crisis, not a geopolitical one.
In its broad outlines, Berman's argument is compelling. I agree that totalitarian movements and regimes have certain fundamental characteristics in common despite their different positions on a right-left or religious-secular or East-West spectrum. I agree that both the left and the advocates of realpolitik seem incapable of recognizing and confronting such movements until their catastrophic consequences are obvious -- and often not even then. Berman lays out the evidence for these propositions with eloquence and rigor. But when it comes to explaining the roots of totalitarianism and the depth of liberal denial, "Terror and Liberalism" is less successful. Berman's framework for discussing the totalitarian impulse is moral and literary, an approach that leaves gaps in the narrative: Why does rebellion turn nihilistic? How does the quest for freedom become a craving for submission, and attraction to the forbidden act of murder merge with a lust for self-destruction?
Berman sees that these dynamics are profoundly erotic. He cites Camus' observation that "the sinister excites. The transgressions of suicide or murder arouse a thrill that sometimes takes an overtly sexual form." Yet because he does not pursue the logic of that thought, he ends up, as so many moralists do, suggesting that totalitarian terror is an unfathomable mystery, that it's foolish not only to try to explain it in rational terms but to try to explain it at all: "At Auschwitz the SS said, 'Here there is no why.' The anti-war Socialists in France believed no such thing. In their eyes there was always a why."
The implication is that irrational equals unintelligible -- a notion long ago thrown into question by the liberal Enlightenment's own self-critique, psychoanalysis. The problem with liberal-rationalist explanations is that they ignore the unconscious, the "why" that refers not to mundane conditions of life in the present but to fantasies shaped by hidden desire, rage and anxiety grounded in the past. The perversion of sexuality into sadistic aggression has always been the underside of repressive patriarchal cultures, East and West; suicide -- aggression turned against the self -- is its close companion. The will to power is the will to ecstasy is the will to surrender is the will to submit and, in extremis, to die. Or to put it another way, the rage to attain a freedom and happiness one's psyche cannot accept creates enormous anxiety and ends in self-punishing despair: murder-suicide, the ultimate expression of rage and despair, stills the anxiety for good.
Since patriarchal culture in its various versions is our universal legacy -- weakened yet far from surpassed even in "enlightened" liberal societies -- it is by no means hyperbolic to suggest that in our hearts we are all potential terrorists. What then is the why that transmutes the urge toward murder-suicide from a private, unconscious nightmare to a symptom of mass-hysterical barbarism cheered on by whole populations? Berman may go too far in discounting the political and economic whys of the liberal rationalists. They do play a part, whether in creating unstable situations that loosen social controls against violent acting out or in exacerbating people's anger while providing it with legitimate rationales and plausible targets. But such conditions only enable terror; they do not cause it. In his discussion of the "hideous schizophrenia" and the fear that it will subvert and destroy Islam, Berman supplies the key to the puzzle: Totalitarian terror is above all the reaction of people who have internalized a rigid patriarchal morality against the desires aroused by contact with liberalism -- against, in a word, temptation. The very violence of the reaction attests to the strength of the temptation -- to the lure of freedom.
So much for the terrorist; but what of the liberal? It seems to me, and I believe Paul Berman would agree, that understanding the motives of totalitarians may in the end be less important than understanding the reluctance to oppose them. Ironically, it is Berman who, in contemplating this part of the story, is lulled by the reasonable surface of things. He attributes the "rationalist naiveté that is shared by almost every part of modern liberal society" -- including the FBI and CIA, who failed to foresee 9/11 despite myriad warning signs -- to ideology: "a belief that, around the world, people are bound to behave in more or less reasonable ways in pursuit of normal and identifiable interests ... that the world is, by and large, a rational place." Irrationalist movements simply don't jibe with the liberal worldview. But this answer begs the question. When people persist in their naiveté in the face of repeated experience, which is to say of history, it's a good guess that something else is going on: namely that they are denying not just the terrorists' dark impulses but also their own.
Rationalism, I would argue, is built on the scaffold of denial -- not vice versa. And in this sense, there is an uneasy link between liberalism and the totalitarian left: Unlike fascism and radical fundamentalism, which anathematize liberalism and glorify the will to power, communism claims to be the true avatar of liberal values -- reason, science, progress, equality, freedom -- and denies the will to power that in fact is embodied in the totalitarian state. If the liberal uses rationalism to ward off murderous thoughts, the communist uses it to deny actual murder -- hence the well-known gap between the ideals of communist revolutionary movements and the character of the resulting regimes.
